Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North (2005) is an indie role-playing game[1] written by Ben Lehman and published by These Are Our Games. Polaris is a collaborative roleplaying game, and as such differs from many role-playing games in that there is no single "game master".[1] A player's "opposition" is controlled by the other players in the game.
The game participated in the Game Chef in 2004, an annual design competition for non-electronic games, challenging participants to write a playable draft of an original game in just over one week, based on a theme and a set of “ingredients". The 2004 ingredients were ice, island, dawn, assault, which ended up inspiring Polaris (arctic elves struggle against themselves and a demonic assault, with the dawn finally coming for the first time in hundreds of years).[2]
Polaris won the Indie RPG Award for Innovation (2005)[3] and Indie RPG Game of the Year Award (2005),[4] was "Runner up" for Best Support (2005)[5] and Best Production (2005),[6] and was also "Runner Up" for the Outie Award Best Sui Generis RPG (2005).[7]
An Italian language translation of the game was released by Janus Designs in 2009[8] and a Spanish one was scheduled for 2012.[9]